by Dani Lamia
“Are you talking about old Eddie Spa-get?” interrupts the old waiter, who had slowly approached our table. “He is dead, you know, just like your father. He was a good man. When my brother went to jail for that thing with his wife, Eddie Spa-get paid his bills and made sure he got what he needed while he was locked up. There used to be an arcade around the corner from here and your father, and your mother, and Angelo, and Eddie Spa-get would go there and they would play games for free, because Eddie Spa-get would trade the teenagers working there pizza for tokens.”
“That’s how Dad decided that we needed to get into video games as well,” I say. “So many other board game manufacturers thought they were just a passing fad, but not Dad.”
“I liked to play the Space,” says the waiter. “I liked to play the Joust and the Asteroid. Eddie Spa-get was never any good at the Asteroid. He wasted so many quarters trying to beat my scores at the Asteroid, but he never got anywhere close. Well, now he’s dead. And now your father is dead, and what does any of that matter anymore? What does anything matter to anyone?”
The waiter wanders away as the security guards come back down.
“We checked the place out,” says Ed. “There isn’t anything up there but some old rat traps and a deflated air mattress. I think somebody must have been sleeping up there, probably breaking in at night.”
I look at my brother and sister.
“We’d better do it soon,” I say.
“And what about Bernard?” asks Gabriella.
“He’s got a life to burn,” I say.
We climb the stairs to the office above Little Bologna. The air is musty, the ceilings are low, and there isn’t much light, even though it is early afternoon. The walls are seafoam green. I can’t remember if that was the last color our mother painted the office or if it has been repainted since.
“There’s probably ten coats of paint on these walls,” I tell Alistair and Gabriella. “Our mom didn’t really know what to do with herself, but she wanted to be useful to the company so she kept painting and repainting the office, choosing the gaudiest and most inappropriate colors that she could find. The walls were bright orange once. Actually, I think she might have even painted them black at one point. And neon purple.”
“I like black paint,” says Gabriella. She touches the wall and I can see her struggling to remember this place. I know that she only remembers what life was like after Nylo was a massive success, when we never had to worry about money again. When it became an abstract concept for us, like process art or the phenomenon of divine grace.
I’ve often wondered if it is the fact that I watched our parents struggle, even slightly and for only a few years, that has given me such a rapacious appetite for business. If being privy to the sweat of their early years made me so dominant.
We take out our game phones and explore the office, looking for the place where they will interface with the hidden box.
“Over here!” yells Alistair, crouching down in a corner. “It’s under this window for some reason.”
Gabriella and I follow his lead, squatting beneath the window and holding our phones under the ledge. They bleep in turn, informing us that we have taken second and third place.
“Now what?” says Alistair.
“Now we’d better call the cops and get out of here,” I say. “They can come and investigate, just in case something goes wrong like the aquarium exploding. I want them to see for themselves that we are all in danger. Maybe then they’ll start taking this whole thing seriously.”
We return downstairs and leave through the restaurant, waving to the old waiter on our way out. As I say goodbye to Alistair and Gabriella, I can’t help but feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction. I am still winning the game. Or at least not losing.
27
“Ed and I have been talking,” says Mel sheepishly as we make our way back to the train.
“Oh yeah?” I say.
“We’re worried about you,” he continues. “We’ve never seen anybody in your specific circumstances before and we aren’t sure that you are taking all the possible precautions to stay safe.”
“Most likely not,” I agree.
“First of all, we don’t think you should go home right now, not while you’re being targeted for attack so flagrantly.”
“That makes sense,” I say. “But then again, home is where all my stuff is. What about the office? Can I keep sleeping there?”
“We don’t think that is a good idea either,” says Ed. “It seems like whoever is doing this is somebody who knows all about the Nylo Corporation and has a grudge against it. The building may not be safe.” He pauses, then looks me in the eye. “You’re looking out after your kids by sending them away, and that’s a good plan. You’re a good mom.”
I am a good mom? Me?
“But who is going to look out after you?” he asks. “That’s our job. We are supposed to have your back and keep you alive. But we’re in over our heads here, with respect to security, and we aren’t ashamed to admit it. We think you should work just as hard to protect yourself as you are working to protect your kids.”
“Alright,” I say. “So what should I do?”
“Don’t you have any friends who could put you up? Somewhere you could crash for a while? Maybe somebody you haven’t talked to in a long time who would be happy to hear from you?”
He’s trying to be helpful, but he doesn’t know how deeply his words cut me. The truth is that I don’t have anybody like that. When Ben and I were together, all of his friends became my friends. They were easy to impress and help out.
The central problem of most people’s lives, especially teachers, is that they don’t have enough money. The central problem of my life is that I have too much money. It was wonderful to be able to play god to his posse of scrappy, salt-of-the-earth Brooklyn intellectuals and artists, getting them work when they needed it in the industries that would be the most helpful to them.
It was like playing a very satisfying strategy game. I had my own Sim City to cultivate, full of fallow fields that I could dump resources into and watch thrive. Before we had kids, I treated his wild pack of college and high school friends as my ersatz children, inserting myself into every aspect of their sad lives, making them dependent on me to a pretty horrifying degree.
Ben loved it. He was like Aladdin with a magic genie and he got to dispense my riches according to his own whims, performing triage among his friends with respect to who needed what and who would benefit the most from my infinite largesse. I liked making Ben so dominant and indispensable among all of the other fellows, and I liked helping him cultivate this grungy garden of bros and bras. It was better than buying lavish real estate. I was trafficking in human souls.
Even those among his friends who were the most resistant to my handouts and charity still took advantage of the Nylo Corporation’s infinite coffers when it came to trips abroad, and yacht parties, and long lazy weeks in Nantucket during the summer. That was when our gray palace on the beach became a permanent crash pad for whoever was rootless and unmoored enough to coke and booze it up with us until they collapsed on king-size beds in private rooms, central air conditioning going full blast on their tanned and well-fed bodies.
During this time, and even after Olivia and Jane were born, I managed to convince myself that Ben’s friends were my friends. In fact, I told myself that they were more than just friends, even if they didn’t know it. They were my vassals. They had started to belong to me in some strange, demented, dependent way.
When we finally ended our relationship for good, my final gift to Ben was to return his friends to him, even if it meant them hating me. I never told him about all the awkward, too-bold overtures even his closest friends made once we were no longer together, leveraging the fake good times we’d had into sudden propositions of sex, of running away together abroad, of drug-fueled benders, of
marriage.
I never told him how his friends abased themselves to remain in my patronage and in my good graces, throwing him aside as fast as they could.
But I didn’t accept any offer, even if occasionally I was lonely enough to want to. I was as cruel to his friends as Ben was to me, when I could have been the opposite and scooped them up and owned them for myself.
This was heartbreaking, but I relished the pain of it. It was one last pointless act of self-abnegation at the altar of his indifference. I had never had a group of friends the way that he did, all of whom depended and relied on each other for moving up in the world, for keeping each other sane, for challenging each other to make the most of themselves, for giving each other the space to make mistakes, and for being there for each other on the other side of failure.
Henley liked Ben’s friends, too. Henley worked his way through all of the women in Ben’s circle, pleased that I brought him such easy pickings. At first, each would picture herself as Henley’s one and only beloved, striding along at his side at the top of the world. But then the dark reality of Henley’s passions would become clearer. They would renounce him with as much cruelty and drama as they could muster, just to try and make him change his awful lizard-like expression.
Henley was sad to see this proletariat henhouse dry up, but he understood how I had to let Ben’s friends return to Ben. How I needed to create a permanent firewall between his world and mine to teach Ben a permanent lesson about the limits of patience and capital in a loveless world.
My own friends from school and childhood had all been achievers and climbers, boring socialites who worshipped and feared me like a force of nature for the way that I preferred the company of men, of games, of dissolution, of narcotic despair.
I was glad to be rid of them, frankly, and avoided anything like reunions or late-night phone calls to reminisce. I had never done social media. I had never created an Instagram account or tried my hand at Twitter like Gabriella, attempting to replace the sucking void of my soul with something like a brand or a fixed identity. I relished the sucking void and had no desire to pretend that it could be plugged, that there was anything like a piece of cork that might take the shape of my wound and stop the respiration process of my shabby, sobbing pain.
“I do not have any friends who I would trust to take care of me in this situation or who I would want to burden with the danger of what might be happening right now,” I finally reply.
Ed and Mel look at each other, so full of knowing compassion that I want to vomit on their shiny shoes.
“Listen,” I say. “I need to clear my head and get away from all of this. I know a place in the Village where we can play very high-stakes board games. I will cover the two of you if you accompany me as my guests and not merely as my employees for the afternoon. If I am going to be murdered, I would rather be murdered there. Actually, it’s probably the safest place in the city I could go. No one knows about it and there are cameras everywhere.”
Ed and Mel look at each other and shrug.
“We have to go where you go,” says Ed.
“Do you like board games?” I ask.
“Sure,” says Ed.
“Do you like gambling?”
“When it’s somebody else’s money,” chuckles Mel.
“Well, I’ll make it easy for you. You can place side bets on the action, betting on any given player to do well. You should just place your bets on me, honestly. If I win, you’ll make some extra cash that you can keep as your own rakings. You will be my personal invited guests.”
“Like I said,” says Ed, “we have to go where you go.”
I pull out my phone, just to make sure Cardboard Struggle is open. It would be rare for them not to be operational on a Friday afternoon, but the proprietor is a cantankerous son of a bitch named Raj Pandat and he keeps to his own hours and runs his board game speakeasy according to his own sadistic whims.
“What?” he says, picking up my call.
“You open?” I ask.
“Yeah, there’s five people playing fifty-grand Sea Farmers, about to stab each other to death over the way the coral is rolling up. Your dad would be proud as shit to see them so angry over something so stupid.”
“I’m on my way,” I say. “If we can get all five on board, I’d like to get a game going. Maybe Diplomacy? Or Teeth of Steel?”
“What’s your bet?” asks Raj.
“I’ll stake a hundred grand, just to call the game. I’m bringing some friends. Security, actually, but tell everyone not to be alarmed. I’m going to stake them, too. They don’t intend to play, but they will certainly enjoy the action.”
“I’m not going to bet on you today,” says Raj. “You don’t sound good. You don’t sound steady. You sound wild and stupid.”
“We’ll be there in thirty minutes,” I say. “Make sure they wrap up this game of Sea Farmers without anyone getting stabbed. Anybody who loses their shirt will have an opportunity to make it back as soon as we get there.”
We take the train down to the Village.
Cardboard Struggle is in a loft apartment off Minetta Alley. I am one of the original investors, having met Raj at the Compleat Strategist long ago when we were both moody, inscrutable jerks who enjoyed being underestimated by the fresh-faced eager teenagers and old crew-cut military men who made up the city’s churning population of elite gamers. He was independently wealthy like me, the son of an Indian steel baron. We both wanted a place where we could be assured of a game that would be challenging but professional, where the stakes could be as high as we wanted and where no one would flinch from the thrill of cardboard carnage.
I ring the buzzer downstairs and, after an interminable wait, the buzzer downstairs correspondingly goes off, signaling that it is okay to come up.
“I guess these are the friends I have left,” I tell Mel and Ed. “Besides you two, of course.”
28
Cardboard Struggle is a three-room loft with a kitchen and two bathrooms.
Two rooms are just for gaming, containing long tables and short ones. There are bars and flat-screen televisions that play video feeds from other high-stakes gaming parlors around the world. If you are bored by the slowness of a game, you can bet on the action elsewhere. Correspondingly, there are cameras all over these gaming rooms that broadcast the feed from here, if everyone agrees to make a game public.
The third room is a giant game library, which has been stocked with almost every existing board game, rows and rows of first editions and reprints. It is a circulating library of the best and the worst, of the most complicated and successful crystallizations of rule and process, arcane systems meant to provoke conflict and satisfy tenuous hierarchies.
All three rooms are wallpapered in game boards, stitched together like the skins of conquered animals. The Tetris tiles of these antique boards loom down over everything, giving the whole place a comforting but claustrophobic feel. Maps and tiles provide too much information everywhere you look. When coupled with the neon lighting and video feeds, Cardboard Struggle has a hallucinogenic effect that can be disorienting, like any good casino.
I love to play here, but I am also an investor, so I have an interest in the house winning. There is a much bigger, much more elaborate, much more proletarian and nerdier version of Cardboard Struggle in Vegas that Raj and I both also have a stake in. We take junkets there sometimes, but it has been a while. We both prefer the skill level and professionalism of New York—a city of strategists, financiers, and secret geniuses.
My two very pleasant and conscientious bodyguards insist on checking out Cardboard Struggle before I go inside.
“Somebody could be monitoring your calls,” says Ed. “In which case, now they would know exactly where you’re headed. You’re telegraphing your moves.”
I let them go up first and do a quick pass while I wait downstairs, pondering th
is warning. Am I really telegraphing my moves? I think about who in my family would be the most capable of monitoring my phone calls and movements. Alistair, definitely. But it’s also entirely conceivable that Angelo Marino could have hired someone to do the same thing. His resourcefulness is undeniable and unbounded, and I have certainly benefited from it over the years.
Ed and Mel come back to me bemused and a little rattled. “It’s all clear,” Ed reports, holding the elevator door open so I can join them for the return trip up.
“Well, well, well,” says Raj Pandat, greeting us as the elevator doors slide open. “Thinking pretty highly of yourself these days, eh? Who in god’s name would ever want to do you harm?”
“Did you clear a space at a table for me or not?” I push past him and enter the first game room. “I’m here to play, and these two are here to lay bets.”
Ed and Mel nod uncertainly.
“Sorry about your father and your little brother, by the way,” says Raj. “I took a lot of money from Henley over the years, and your father was a legend, a true hero of games, though he wasn’t as good of a player as you. Too generous—too much heart.”
“Thanks for saying that,” I say, shocked. I have never known Raj to be sentimental, and I have never heard him say anything nice about anyone, ever. His sudden praise of both me and my father is almost heartbreaking. I find myself tearing up and have to look away.
“Everyone is waiting,” says Raj. “We’ll all let you stake your hundred grand if you really want to play Teeth of Steel. You haven’t won yet.”
“I don’t think I’ll lose today,” I say. “Do we draw for armies?”
“We’ve decided to let you pick first, on account of the tragedies and all.”
“Nothing gets my rage, skill, and dander up like sudden tragedy,” I say. “You’re all going to lose a lot of money if you keep being nice to me.”
